Who does not love a donut, I think the local “Donut Shop” is the best, bar none.

There are a number of theories about who actually invented them, but I think we need to pay homage to someone for bringing us these little beauties. In one theory it is suggested that doughnuts were introduced into North America by Dutch settlers. This theory is bolstered by the fact that in the mid-19th century doughnuts were called olykoeks ("oily cakes") by the Dutch. However, there is also archaeological evidence that the pastries were prepared by prehistoric Native Americans in the southwestern United States so the Dutch may have stolen the idea. A fellow by the name of Gregory Hansen, an American laid claim to the ring-shaped doughnut in 1847. When he was sixteen serving on a lime trading ship he became dissatisfied with the greasiness and raw centers of the doughnuts of the day. He punched a hole in the center of dough with the ship's tin pepper box allowing the doughnuts to cook more thoroughly. I am not sure the exact lineage of the tasty little treat but they are tasty little treats.

I have had many donuts over the years but two best donuts in the world are to found at Mrs. Murphy’s donuts on College highway in Southwick Massachusetts and at the Donut Shop on University blvd in Jacksonville Florida. Mrs. Murphy’s I was turned onto by a friend who grew up in the north, we still get them sometimes, either shipped in or hand carried. The Donut shop shares a building with a Gate station where I get my morning coffee. I have travelled the world, literally, and have found no donuts that compare, foreign or domestic. I am sure somewhere out there a rival exists for these two but I have not found them.

My favorite donuts have always been the plain cake, that with a glass of milk is a small sampling of what heaven must be like. This is an area that Mrs. Murphy’s excels, there plain cake donut is huge, probably 4 inches around and maybe 1.5 inches thick. I have never measured but they are huge and VERY good. The Donut shop makes a fantastic cake donut as well but they are not as large. As far as the plain glazed I feel the Donut shop excels, very light and fluffy without an overloading of glaze that you might see at a Krispy Kream. Mrs. Murphy’s plain glazed is also very good. The donut shop has what they call an “ugly”. I am not sure how that donut got started but it looks like a big blob and is kind of ugly and is so wonderful I can not even come up with words to describe it. I liken it to experiencing the pyramids of Egypt, I have never been able to explain what that experience was like. Yes an “ugly” is that good.

I have not had any type of donut for over 13 weeks, which I believe is a record. I am trying to lose weight and donuts are not going to contribute in a positive way to that effort. It has been hard for me as I stop at the Gate to get my coffee every morning and can smell those little wonderfully delicate beauties. I have another 29 weeks of dieting if all goes according to plan before I reach my goal weight of 200 pounds, although I know I will be limited I am looking forward to being able to have, at least occasionally, a donut with my morning coffee or a glass of cold milk.

Where do you get your donuts?

I play the lotto and plan on winning and even if I don’t, here is why it is OK

I have played the lotto for some time now, I have seen games come and go, and I still play. I have seen the drawings go from once a week to twice a week, and still I play. I have never won much more than a free ticket, and I still play. I take the ration about wasting my money, and still I play. I realized most of the money is not going to education, and still I play. I learned my odds are winning are one in 22,957,480 (for the Florida lotto) and still I play. I found that when playing the Florida Power Ball my odds were one in 195,249,054 and you guessed it, still I play. When someone told me the odds for the fantasy 5 were one in 376,992 and I started playing that occasionally as well.

So like I said I have never won much more than a free ticket but I know my day is coming. Today’s the day. I buy 2 per week, there are two drawings ya know. I never get crazy or stupid when the drawing gets really big, the odds are the same on a per ticket basis and buying 10 dollars worth of tickets when compared to odds of 195 million to one is easily shown as a waste of 9 dollars, the odds are even more against you than when you are in Vegas. I know people who do not agree with stacking most of the winnings at the top, meaning more money for 6 numbers than 5 and 4 that only gets a few bucks. They feel it should be more evenly distributed but I am convinced that would be detrimental to the game. The chance at the big payoff, no matter the odds is what draws me in, not an equitable distribution of the winnings.

So my Wife still gives me a hard time about spending the money, well here is my answer to that. During the course of the week I think about or more importantly, talk about what I am going to do with my winnings for no less than ½ hour and probably all said and told it is closer to 1 hour. From my perspective I am getting ½ - 1 hour of entertainment for a couple of bucks, where in the world can you get any entertainment for a couple of bucks, unless you are “people watching” at the beach or in the mall. That comes with a potential cost as well if someone accuses you of stalking but that is a story for another day.

We already have our exit strategy planned when we win. I just can never understand when I see someone show up the next day to collect the winnings. I do not care who you are you do not have the skills to manage an 85 million dollar win. We would wait at least 6 months, during which we would hire accountants, lawyers and setup a foundation. The accountants would ensure our money is safe and very well diversified and any other things that I do not know about, but I know there is more to handling 85 million than just making a deposit at the Compass bank. The lawyers would be setting up my foundation, I would not want people bothering me for money, a foundation could handle some of the distribution, preferably to the non profit sector as we will need tax shelters. The lawyers would also be working on the necessary paperwork for changing our names after we collect the winnings. After signing the big check we will become John and Jane Dough, I thought that was funny and with that much money I can do that.

So when our departure date arrives we are just going to pop off the grid. People will wonder where we are and come by the house, cars still there, stuff still in the house, mailbox full we will have just disappeared. We will become that odd couple that got rich in the dotcom boom and moved into a modest neighborhood in nowhere America. We have already mastered the odd part so telling the rest of the story should not be all that tough.

Do you play the lotto?

So do we live in a civilized society or what? People who do not clean up after their dogs

I live in the city, on a corner lot so I have sidewalks in front of and beside my house. Our neighborhood is one that has lots of people walking, jogging and partaking in all forms of exercise, including walking their dogs. There is a written and unwritten code of conduct when it comes to when and more specifically where your dog goes pooh. The unwritten code is that you have some way to clean up your dogs mess and take it with you, a Ziploc sandwich baggy if you pooch is small, a gallon freezer baggy if your K9 is medium sized and some sort of self closing Rube Goldberg apparatus if your puppy resembles a Shetland pony. In the city I reside there are ordinances on the books that address this issue as well. If you are caught, at least two witnesses or video proof, letting your dog do his business on someone else’s lawn you can be fined up to 50 dollars. We had to know the ordinance code as well, according to the cop, because most of the police are not going to know it or take the time to look it up and they would consider you a whiner from that point forward, I am not kidding that is what the cop said to me.

Now I want you to know that Mr. Oatmeal is not a whiner, he does spend a lot of time working in his yard though and dog crap is a hindrance to that effort. Not that my yard is perfect but I work hard to keep it covered with grass and mostly green. I do not do this solely for myself, I could care less to tell you the truth, I do this to help maintain the property values in my neighborhood. If you get a bunch of houses in a neighborhood that have poor lawns and poorly designed and maintained landscaping it looks bad and has a direct impact on property values. Most of my neighbors share my opinions when it comes to the proper maintenance of the lawns, some are more about the keeping up with the Jones than just keeping the property value up. Doesn’t really matter to me what their motivation is as long as they look nice and do not destroy my property value. I have removed every living thing in my yard, with the exception of the 100-foot oak trees, and replaced it all with more suitable plant material. I installed plants that are indigenous to our area which minimizes water usage which is another concern when dwelling in the city. The chosen plants also have rotating blooming cycles so there is color there all year long. I am doing my part!

My current lot is 115 feet by 115 agonizing feet, I started with a 20 inch push mower and with saint Augustine grass that is prevalent here it damn near killed me keeping it mowed down. Later I acquired a Snapper riding lawn mower that was abandoned behind the bushes at a neighbor of a friend of mines house. It was a rusted hulk that would not even roll and had a number of busted plastic covers. After a couple of weeks of work and less than 20 dollars in parts I had it going and the 18 horse tractor with a 38 inch cut allowed me to cut the grass in a fraction of the push mower method. This was also a contributing factor in my weight gain as well, not enough exercise and a story for another day. This tractor allowed me to spend less time running the mower and more time keeping the grass green and landscaping up to snuff. With the additional work in the yard I found that more and more I was getting dog crap all over myself, while in certain situations and ceremonies that is not all bad, I would prefer to be crap free while working in my yard. Now if you live in the country you are probably going what the hell is wrong with Mr. Oatmeal, I can understand as I grew up living the country. Just as you would stop and offer assistance to anyone broken down in the middle of nowhere we in the city try to live in equilibrium with our neighbors, it is harder to do but still we do it to contribute to our society.

So if you live in the city and you walk your dog, especially in my neighborhood, take something to gather up the processed remains of the Purina dinner your K9 consumed.

A buoy designed for use in Lake Michigan can cook a steak? What???

In 1950 a part owner and worker at a sheet metal fabrication company in Mount Prospect Illinois decided that he had had enough ruined meat and burned food produced on the old timey open top grills that were available at the time. This company, among other things, built buoys that were used in Lake Michigan, two spheres that were welded together to make them water tight. After some work cutting one apart and some additional fabrication on a rounded removable top the “Sputnik” had arrived. George Stephen Sr. decided to call the contraption the “George’s Barbeque Kettle” instead of the name Sputnik his neighbors had attached to his invention. By 1952 sales of George’s Barbeque Kettle were continuing to increase so the barbecue division of the company was established. George Stephen Sr. then bought out the “Weber Brothers factory” and dedicated it to produce only the Kettle grills, the Weber Kettle grills. The Weber Kettle grills are the best grill ever designed and placed into production, period.

I love to grill out, from steaks to a wonderful pork roast to the perfectly grilled bacon wrapped shrimp. I have found the 22.5 inch kettle made by Weber to be, bar none, the best grill in the world and have used one exclusively for almost 20 years. In the early days of my adulthood I ate food prepared on other peoples “Weber kettle”. In 1990 I purchased my first kettle, we had just moved to a new city and did not have a lot of money. My wife came home from the grocery with a BEAUTIFUL set of ribs for dinner, she also had a disposable grill she had paid 3.99 for. You know the kind, it was a thin aluminum pan with charcoal and grate built in, a one shot deal. Well one look at that piece of crap grill and one more look at the BEAUTIFUL ribs and I realized even with our limited financial resources we could not risk losing our investment by ruining those ribs. Seems I remember we had about 80 bucks left in checking until the next payday so we did not have a lot of resources. Since we had just moved to our new city we did not know anyone at all, let alone someone that would loan us a grill. I made the critical decision to take 59 of our 80 dollars and use it to purchase a 22.5 inch Weber Kettle, black was the only color available then. Damn those ribs were good! We somehow survived and made it to the next payday without starving.

That grill served us well during our apartment dwelling days, although I did have to carry it down to the ground floor to use it. It remained an outside unit for the duration of our apartment life. When we moved into our first house, I wanted to store the kettle, as it had became known, out of the weather. After much consternation, I realized that the limited inside space on the house, this was a car port home and very limited shed space that the kettle would have to live outside. A couple of coats of wax were my answer to keeping it outside. While that coat of wax produced some odors, on the outside, there was no affect on its cooking ability or the taste of the food cooked inside. I found that the grates, one to hold the charcoal and the cooking grate needed replaced after about 5 years, I was OK with that, as it seemed a small price to pay for the fabulous meals I could prepare. For the entire 9 years we lived in that house the kettle sat out back, exposed to the weather, I had long since given up on the waxing. When we moved to our second home, old kettle came along, he was showing only minimal signs of his outdoor living. By 2007 it was becoming apparent to me that I was going to have put kettle down. His legs were giving out, his three vents, lungs I called them, along the bottom had long since been cobbled back on and the wooden handles were long gone. I was not looking forward to having to put him down. He was my friend for 17 years and provided me good service for entire length of our relationship. I was very sad, therapy helped but never completely removed the sting.

I was so distraught that I wrote a letter to Weber to tell of my disappointment in kettles short 17-year life span. I received word back from the folks at Weber that kettles come with a warrantee but my kettle was past that period. Kettle and I had gotten more years than the coverage period, my sadness was lifting and I began to just appreciate the extra time we were allowed to share. When kettle and I started our relationship Weber did not have the large selection of grilling options that are available today. When I was researching a replacement for kettle, replacing kettle is still hard for me to say, I found that there are many options when it comes to outdoor grilling, even in the Weber line up. I found two grills in the 22.5 inch, charcoal burning line, the “One Touch Gold” and the “One Touch Silver”. Both had some design changes, some might call them improvements but I was apprehensive. The one touch silver was closest to my kettle with the exception of the lungs, kettle had three individually adjustable vents with round holes, something I found effective for controlling and localizing the heat when cooking pork roasts. This one touch silver had a new fangled integrated venting system, more parts meaning more parts that could fail was my thought. This new fangled thing has one handle that controlled airflow through all three vents, which had become slots instead of the round holes kettle had used. The one touch gold model had other fancy contraptions to catch ashes as well as the integrated venting system, to many innovative accessories for me so I immediately ruled it out as an option. I did finally make the agonizing decision to get the one touch silver in the standard black, all the color options confused me and I wanted kettle’s replacement to follow the lead of kettle and have the same heritage.

After fashioning my own hard maple handles to replace the injection molded plastic ones that came stock. Junior and I have developed a good relationship with each other, he will never replace kettle in my mind but all of kettle’s memory lives on in Junior.

What kind of grill do you use?

Threat level Orange, better lock our car doors

So when did we become so obsessed with locking our car doors every time we get out of them. It seems we have reached a ridiculous state, especially in this day and age. My Dad bought a brand new truck in 1965 and I do not think the ignition key EVER came out, for the entire 35 or so years he owned the truck. So I am pretty sure the doors never got locked and his life and the truck or my Dad was none the worse for wear. Now a days I see people lock their doors when the stop to pump gas, they are never further than 1 foot away from the car. I see them lock their doors when popping in to pick up the dry cleaning, kind of stupid when you think about it, and when they park the vehicle in the garage, trust me I was as surprised to see it as you are to read about it.

Where did it start and where will it end, this bizarre obsession with locking up the goodies we leave in our cars. Chrysler did not even do away with the pushbutton start and start using an ignition key until 1949 a scant 60 years ago. Now you can get cars that don’t even have traditional keys, little FOB’s with and RFID (radio frequency identification) chip you carry in your pocket or purse that tell the car to lock or unlock the doors as you get close or are moving away from the vehicle. They also activate the push button control on the dash so you can turn the car on or off. Believe it or not, Sharp has developed a new chipset for cell phones that will be able to perform all the tasks of the key FOB, a whole new level of multitasking that your cell phone will do for you. This little gadget can be programmed to keep you from talking on the cell phone when you are driving. That is the first bit of cell phone technology I like by the way. Now we have gadgets telling us what and when we can talk on the phone, I love it (read sarcasm). This is a major reason I drive a 51 year old jalopy, absolutely none of that crap on my car, the man is not going to tell me when I can talk on the phone!

I can see where those types of keys are time savers and offer conveniences the old chrome plated brass keys do not. The major difference between the two as I see it is cost verses convenience, my brass key cost less than a buck from an aftermarket company that supplies retro keys for the older cars, and another buck or so to get the kid at the hardware store to cut it for me. I have even cut them myself with a file designed for sharpening a chainsaw. I am not sure what the wireless key fob adds to the cost of the car overall, the system requires an extensive array of electronics in the car, that is on top of the cost of the little gadget you would carry. And don’t get me started about what it would cost to replace one of those gadgets, in time and money. You would have the cost of the gadget and then the cost to reprogram an off the shelf unit to recognize you and your car. The cost of the reprogramming the thing one time alone will be more than I spend in a lifetime on chrome plated brass keys.

So enough about the advances in key technology, sounds crazy even saying “key technology” has advanced doesn’t it? So why is our society so security conscience when it comes to locking our car doors. I never lock the doors on my old jalopy because if it is stolen and by chance I get it back I do not want to have to replace the window that was busted out. What do we keep in our cars that is so important we keep it locked up? In mine there is an old canvas bag full of tools, they have saved me numerous times from walking, there is my registration and proof of insurance, maybe a cup of coffee and a radio. Nothing that seems important enough to “lock down”, from my perspective anyway.

Well if it not the contents, well then maybe it is the car itself that we do not want stolen. Let me tell you friends any car newer than about 10 years old is not like my old car, which I could steal with a screwdriver and a piece of lamp cord in about 30 seconds. You would almost need an advanced degree in electronic engineering with a minor in radio frequency identification technology to get the thing started at all let alone in the time it will take you to walk into get a coffee, even if you had to wait in line at Starbucks. I think we are applying old world thinking, it is just a chrome plated brass key, to new world technology, complex and probably encrypted, electronic gadgets which “boot up” the cars of today. After all if it is stolen, it is only a car, it is not like you are abusing your kids by kicking them out of the car miles from home to walk home (that happened to me and my sister twice). If by some chance some random electronic engineer with a minor in radio frequency identification technology wants your car, he will defeat your home alarm system and steal it right out of your garage anyway, so enjoy your coffee and live with reckless abandon, leave the car door unlocked.

What kind of key starts and locks your car?

What is up with the Swiffer Wet Jet? That little gizmo designed for cleaning smooth floors.

In Mr. Oatmeal’s home we have pets, as those who have pets know we also deal with all the issues that having pets comes with. We have always had pets and will most likely always have pets, that has forced us to make certain choices with regards to our home decorating style, specifically what is the optimum flooring to accommodate pets. We also have a pool which imposes some additional limitations when it comes to our flooring choices. My bride and I have lived in four apartments and owned two houses, our flooring has ranged from cheap to very expensive carpeting to parquet wood floors to ceramic tile to plain old concrete I painted to look like ceramic tile and sealed with urethane to a stained concrete with an indestructible epoxy finish. Through all of those floor coverings I believe we found the ideal flooring. It effectively deals with dogs and cats that have occasional accidents, cough up hairballs and shed all over the place and it also addresses the additional water brought in from the pool, epoxy coated stained concrete.

About three years ago, we had this installed throughout our home. The installer made the flooring mimic the look of shiny white marble with grey veining. While there are some installation flaws, as there are with any flooring installation, but we love the overall look and feel, it is easy to clean up animal messes without the fear of smells lingering or stains remaining after cleaning. It is also impervious to the water we may bring in when coming out of the pool. It did require me to install felt feet on everything we own, that was a lot more involved than I thought it would be. Some furniture required drilling and tapping of the legs, others required hammering in a felt covered foot and yet others required a double sided tape application of the felt. It was a time consuming thing to do it correctly, I did not want to be constantly worrying about them coming off and damaging the epoxy coating. Plus, I do not know how to repair the epoxy coating anyway, so that was a contributor to the felt feet decision as well.

This is where we then needed to find a gizmo to clean the floor, no more vacuuming the carpet. I see advertising for noodle mops, sponge mops and even a wonder mop but then I see a thing called a “Swiffer Wet Jet” and I was sure that is what will make cleaning the floor enjoyable, the woman in the commercial was actually humming her favorite tune while running this thing. I was excited, the perfect flooring and the perfect cleaner. When I started using the Swiffer Wet Jet I found I too would hum my favorite tune while using the thing. I was ready to strike of a letter to the manufacturer telling of my positive experience with their product. It did not take me long to realize though that I should wait for a bit before sending off the letter. After the first month I realized this was indeed not an ideal solution, they tend to be very expensive if you clean the floors of a whole house. I also noticed that you had to almost sweep the floor first to get most of the animal hair up before “Swiffering” and I also learned the traditional broom was ineffective on this type of flooring. I was back to square one looking for the ideal cleaning product.

So there I was one day at the hospital visiting a friend, stay with just a minute, and noticed some tools they were using to clean the floors throughout the hospital. When I started inquiring about the devices from the hospital employee using them I thought for a moment I might be hauled out by security. After assuring her that my intentions were honorable and I just wanted to see the gizmos and ask about their performance all was OK. Well come to find out Rubbermaid corporation makes an entire line of industrial cleaning gizmos that far exceed the consumer grade “Swiffer” type products in many ways, in my humble opinion. The Swiffer dusters now that is a different story, for around the home they are second to none in dust collection but their Swiffer floor cleaning products left me wanting.

The Rubbermaid commercial product line include many products but under the cleaning sub-category there are two I want to talk about. The microfiber dry dust mops, like the ones janitors use to clean long tile hallways and the microfiber damp mops. They offer both these products in a smaller 18 wide versions that I found to sized perfectly for the home. I would will need to purchase the handles and frames separately. So I found for what I was spending on the Swiffer Wet Jet I would pay for the commercial grade products within the first couple of months of use. These products claim the ability to be washed up to 300 times, since we clean house only once a week that meant they should last me about 6 years before needing replaced. That 6 years is the life span if we religiously cleaned once a week, sometimes we go two or three but never four. So the commercial cleaning solution was looking better and better from the economic perspective as well as the performance of the product perspective. I am long past being easily impressed by anything but these products impressed me, both in their ability to clean well and their durable and rugged construction, they are the perfect product for cleaning my perfect flooring. We have been using the commercial products for quite some time and none show any wear at all yet.

So do you use a Swiffer wet jet to clean your floors?

Americans are consumerists living in a society driven exclusively by consumerism

Don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

So not long ago I received a comment on my “Would you rip someone off for sixty four cents? How my morning Coffee will be forever changed” commentary that talked about running out of space on this old planet and the benefits of recycling. Since then I have been paying closer attention to how much garbage I haul to the curb to be picked up by nameless men and taken away to an unknown place. I was kinda shocked to see how much stuff I throw away every week and started feeling guilty. Why you might ask, my community provides the citizenry the ability to recycle specific bits of debris that would otherwise go into the landfill. Mr. Oatmeal is ashamed to admit that he has never used that blue bin for anything other than storing my lawn chemicals in the shed. There is another story for another day. I have since emptied my lawn chemicals but have not yet started using the blue bin for recycling. I need to find out more about what items I am allowed to put in there and I would like to visit the unknown place it all goes here in town. a poor excuse I know but I am working on it.

In my attempt to become more conscience of my “impact” on the world I decided to start learning about recycling. I learned there is some dispute as to who or what is at the top of that list, some say iron and steel are by far the most recycled and others claim that asphalt roadways top the list. For the sake of the conversation I will give them equal billing at the top. In looking in my trash can I do not have a lot of iron and steel or asphalt to move over to my blue recycle bin. I also learned that while plastic recycling is on the rise it presents a few challenges, different plastics can’t be mixed, so proper sorting is critical. To add to the confusion is the labeling, does that mean it was made using recycled material or that it can be recycled. There a smarter people them me working on solutions to those problems and I see a day not to far off where that type of ambiguity is gone. Glass and aluminum are high on the recycle list, recycling glass offers other impact reducing advantages as well. When ground up glass, called cullet, is added to the raw materials used to make glass it somehow reduces the melting point (who knows why) which allows the manufacturer to further reduce their impact by using less electricity that was most likely generated by the coal fired electricity plant.

So during that investigation, which is ongoing, I began to realize how much stuff we Americans and other developed nations “consume”. On my street alone most people have a least two garbage cans on trash day. When you think about it our society has become one of massive consumerism that is driven by our thinking we need everything all the time and it has to offer every time saving feature some dude in a rubber room can dream up. We used to be a society that was self sufficient, able to solve problems with innovative solutions that had a minimal impact on our surroundings, we hacked our way through and settled the west for Christ sakes with nothing more than rifles and true American grit. Now we tend not to fix anything, we replace it. What rung on the socio-economic ladder we are on determines the level of our consumerism insanity, the insanity is present on every single rung from top to bottom. Even those on a low rung would never consider having a cell phone “fixed” instead of getting a new one. We can apply that to our cars, our dishwashers, lawn mowers, microwave ovens and even light fixtures. Why don’t we just try to fix these things anymore, fixing things would reduce our impact and in the case of cars it may knock steel off the top of the most recycled list. Cars more than 10 years or so are seen as to old to keep.

Recycling is a key component of modern waste management but it is the third component of the “reduce, reuse and recycle” waste hierarchy. I want to speak for just a moment about the other two legs of the waste management stool. Waste reduction takes careful planning and purchasing of everything from potato’s (compost skins if you don’t eat them) to the automobiles that use renewable resources such as soy beans for seat foam to ones that minimize their use of hazardous materials. I have been thinking a lot how I can minimize my waste footprint. The reuse leg I have pretty much under control, I fix things around my house. I fix the washer when many would replace it, I fix the furniture instead of replacing, I fix the pool pump instead of replacing, I even fixed an 8 dollar thumb drive once and most of all I fix my jalopy instead of replacing. All of these actions save me money which was my initial goal but I now realize that has helped me reduce my overall waste impact on society. The recycle leg I am working on and I am going to improve but minimizing the accumulation of waste and keeping things operating before they need recycled seems an easier approach, at least to me. So I ask your understanding and want you to get off my back about not using my blue recycle bin yet.

What is your overall impact on our world?